Ironic Bonding

A science comic series. Welcome to what goes on in my head when I come across various scientific terms. Science is a way of looking at and understanding the world. Art is produced by those who see the world in different ways. Through art and through science, there are countless filters through which we can understand the many complexities of existence and life itself. Here are illustrations of concepts I find amusing in science, which will give you a glimpse into how I see the world. Hopefully these comics will find lots of receptors! in grad school for pharmacology :)

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What do you call it when your car disappears?

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The meaning of life

In a small study, we observed that you encounter lots of problems whenever you try to do anything. We conclude that problems are the result of trying to do stuff and that not doing anything will eliminate all of our problems.

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I'm going to start a journal Nurture. Then we can debate all about what journal is more prestigious, Nature versus Nurture. I hope my impact factor is -273.

[elisegoeseast]

My predominant feeling is one of gratitude … I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and an adventure.

–The late, great Oliver Sacks

I’m grateful for all of you. Arigato, Xie Xie and Kamsahamnida. Have a very happy Thanksgiving.

(via elisegoeseast)

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Systems biologist pickup lines

I'd like to analyze your pathways. I'd like to study your feedback mechanisms. How about we integrate our -omics? You've got some significant features. I'd like to see if there's any overlap with mine. I'd like to understand your principal components.

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The Cysteine Chapel

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World of Immunobiology

Imagine an mmorpg about the immune system. You start off as a hematopoietic stem cell then you pick what lineage you want, each playing different roles as you experience an epic journey throughout the body while encountering invaders and disease. Choose your signaling molecules wisely. Consult with the wise and unforgiving thymus to mature or be destroyed...recognize friends from foes and experience betrayal at a cellular level in the immersive worst selling game of all time... Immune world. Also buy the microbiome and hapten expansion packs coming soon as well.

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A very disturbing public health trend has been observed over the past 11 years.  Our results suggest a causal link between amount of honey produced in the United States and mortality caused by limb amputation.  We demonstrate that severed limbs translocate in a beekeeper dependent manner to bee colonies and activate receptors in bees that increase honey production because they fear their limbs being cut off if they don't produce enough honey.  Previous research has also shown if you knock out the fear sensor in bees, that there is no increase in honey production following severed limb exposure compared to a vehicle treatment.  We demonstrate that if the beekeepers did not place limbs in proximity to bee colonies, there was no increase in honey production.  We did not consider if the mortality caused by the amputation of limbs was caused by overworked disgruntled worker bees, or if the limbs may originate from beekeepers not wearing adequate PPE, and therefore these may be confounding variables in our study.  Also not considered was a possible reverse causality effect where honey consumption causes aggressive behaviors that lead to death by dismemberment.  Future directions for this line of work include exposing bees to scary movies, torture, and other threatening stimuli to study the effect of fear on honey production.

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The opposite of a hypothesis is a hyperthesis?

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when you have a significant other, that means the probability that you guys don’t like each other is less than 5% (but that means if you’ve had lot of significant others, then you might want to apply a false discovery rate correction)

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What do you call people doing gene set enrichment analysis?  People on the leading edge of biological research.

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How do you compliment a metabolomics data set?  By telling it what nice features it has.

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People that study asteroids colliding with earth only publish in the journals with the highest impact factors.

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Scientists, like dictators, share many common traits... one of which is the need to control everything.

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Membrane Potentials Part III.  When the rush kind of calms down...

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What happens when doors open on black friday...